Shiite militiamen in Basra openly controlled wide swaths of the city on Saturday and staged increasingly bold raids on Iraqi government forces sent five days ago to wrest control from the gunmen, witnesses said, as Iraqi political leaders grew increasingly critical of the stalled assault.
Witnesses in Basra said members of the most powerful militia in the city, the Mahdi Army, were setting up checkpoints and controlling traffic in many places ringing the central district controlled by some of the 30,000 Iraqi Army and police forces involved in the assault. Fighters were regularly attacking the government forces, then quickly retreating.
Senior members of several political parties said the operation, ordered by Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, had been poorly planned. The growing discontent adds a new level of complication to the American-led effort to demonstrate that the Iraqi government had made strides toward being able to operate a functioning country and keep the peace without thousands of American troops.
Mr. Maliki has staked his reputation on the success of the Basra assault, fulfilling a longstanding American desire for him to boldly take on militias.
But as criticism of the assault has risen, it has brought into question another American benchmark of progress in Iraq: political reconciliation… [emphasis added]
Inserted from <NY Times>
This has nothing to do with Al Qaeda or sectarian violence. It’s a struggle between Shia militia’s, the Mahdi Army and the Badr Brigade. Maliki is trying to consolidate then power of his faction over that of Al Sadr. Despite support from Bush, McConJob, Petraeus, and the GOP, Maliki’s effort is failing. In many cases, his troops have surrendered and handed over their weapons to the Sadrists, as pictured above. But when all else fails, they can depend on the Reichsministry of propaganda, aka Faux Noise.
On Thursday, President Bush declared that the violence currently engulfing the southern Iraqi city of Basra is “very positive” because it shows that the Iraqi government “is willing to take on elements that believe they are beyond the law.” On the same day, White House spokesman Gordon Johndroe said that clashes in Basra are “a credit not only to the Iraqis, but to the success of the surge.”
On Mike Gallagher’s radio show yesterday, Chris Wallace, the host of Fox News Sunday, echoed the Bush administration’s spin and declared that violence in Basra is “good news”:
We’re going to talk about Iraq and the Iraqi offensive, which I think, in a sense, is good news. Because it’s the Iraqi government, who’s mostly Shi’ite, taking on Shi’ite outlaw militias in the southern part of the country and this is after all what the whole point of the surge and our efforts there was supposed to be all about, was to get the Iraqis to stand up and control their own country.
… [emphasis added]
Inserted from <Think Progress>
Faux Noise can not save the Reich from their failures. They can only misinform GOP twenty percenters and apolitical sheeple who lack the civic responsibility to inform themselves. While the rest of the MSM is largely silent, Faux Noise grossly and intentionally distorts the truth. It falls to us to spread the word in every way we can, because there can be no democracy when voters do not have valid factual information.
Cross-posted from Politics Plus
